True Gentlemen

by John Hechinger

  Still, bigoted Ivy League admissions officers accepted some Jews and blacks. Not so, fraternities. Consider the contrast between SAE and Princeton, often considered the most “Southern” member of the Ivy League. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910, held racial views that were similar to the leaders of SAE. Wilson, a member of the University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter, grew up in the South and worked to keep blacks out of Princeton. As president of the United States, he oversaw the segregation of the federal workforce. Yet even Princeton admitted its first African American student in 1945, decades after other Ivy League schools and six years before the Chicago SAE convention reaffirmed the fraternity’s commitment to discrimination.

  Before World War II, fraternities made no effort to conceal their admissions policies. In a 1936 Ohio State University catalog, dozens of Greek chapters were listed with descriptions and membership requirements, their racial and ethnic divisions multiplying to the point of absurdity. Like SAE, Delta Tau Delta and Phi Delta Theta were restricted to “the Aryan race.” Lambda Chi Alpha accepted “non-Semitic” students. Phi Delta Chi was open to “Protestant pharmacy and chemistry students” and Alpha Zeta to “Gentile agricultural students.” Alpha Rho Chi was looking for “white male students registered in the departments of architecture, architectural engineering or in professional courses in landscape architecture, interior decoration or sculpture.”

  After World War II, politicians, colleges, and the public began questioning such restrictions. The 1947 movie Gentleman’s Agreement attacked the kind of anti-Semitism on display at the SAE convention. It won three Academy Awards, including best picture. That year, President Harry Truman, a former Missouri farmer who had been known to use racial epithets, began a campaign for civil rights. He formed a committee to fight discrimination and appointed a commission to study the state of higher education as 1 million veterans flooded campuses. This older, more diverse group no longer reflected a country-club vision of college life. The Truman commission called for a doubling of college enrollment to 4.6 million, by 1960. It decried racial and religious discrimination, particularly quotas restricting blacks and Jews. The commission viewed those policies as reminiscent of the Nazis and “one of the plainest inconsistencies with our national ideal.” Truman, by executive order, desegregated the military and prohibited discrimination in federal employment.

  Truman’s actions alarmed fraternities. In 1946, L. G. Balfour, a Sigma Chi member from Kentucky who ran a business selling fraternity pins and rings, distributed a bulletin about the threat of integration. He called it an assault on democracy. In his view, it resulted from the jealousy of “the unadjusted and the frustrated.” The statement quoted an unnamed judge and fraternity supporter who questioned “the theory that all races and religions should associate and intermarry” and “the old outmoded Russian theory of Communism that all must be reduced to the social level of the lowest.” Fraternities at the universities of Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina incorporated racially tinged themes into their symbols and parties, according to the historian Anthony James. Confederate flags flew over chapter houses at the Kappa Alpha Order, Kappa Sigma, SAE, and Phi Delta Theta fraternities. Parties with minstrel shows and blackface proliferated. SAE at the University of Georgia chapter started holding a Magnolia Ball, where the “clock was turned back 100 years” to the days of “stately Southern gentlemen with long plantation coats and top hats.” From 1945 to 1963, the fraternity section of the University of Alabama yearbook had thirteen Confederate-themed photographs, James found. Entries featured captions such as “The South Shall Rise Again” or “The Klan in their afternoon formals.” In 1947, members of SAE at the University of Oklahoma performed in blackface at a Christmas party. When I was at the University of Oklahoma, I found a 1949–1950 SAE scrapbook that featured a photo from an “International Ball” showing “Walter K and his Southern girl.” Both wore blackface. Walter looked like a hobo, wearing a top hat and vest with no shirt. His date had bones in her short hair and a nostril ring.

  Outside the South, colleges pressured fraternities to integrate, pitting Greek alumni against more open-minded students. In 1946, Amherst College in Massachusetts decided that no fraternity could operate on campus if it restricted membership based on race, religion, or ethnicity, as the historian Nicholas Syrett recounts. Two years later, the school’s Phi Kappa Psi chapter pledged a black freshman. Its national headquarters revoked the chapter’s charter. Phi Sigma Kappa took the same step when its Boston University chapter pledged an African American. The University of Connecticut, in 1949, and the State University of New York system, in 1953, both told fraternities they had to eliminate discriminatory practices. Many fraternities, like SAE, dropped discriminatory language while continuing to keep blacks and Jews out of their chapters.

  During the civil-rights era, conflicts intensified between colleges and fraternities, as well as between students and alumni. In 1962, Williams College announced a ban on fraternities, saying they were interfering with its academic and social mission. After the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, fraternities faced pressure to desegregate or shut down. When national fraternities refused, some chapters broke away to form separate local organizations that could offer membership bids to any student. Sigma Chi’s Stanford University chapter won praise from the college when it sent two members on the dangerous “Freedom Summer” civil rights rides to Mississippi in 1964. The next year, Sigma Chi’s national headquarters suspended the organization when it pledged a black student. Still, some members of SAE played high-profile roles in defense of civil rights. Ivan Allen Jr., mayor of Atlanta for much of the 1960s, worked with Martin Luther King Jr. to fight segregation and testified in favor of President John F. Kennedy’s civil-rights legislation. Edward Breathitt Jr., the governor of Kentucky, then led the state to pass antidiscrimination laws considered stronger than those in Washington.

  As higher education began to embrace diversity, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton dropped Jewish quotas and instituted affirmative-action programs to enroll blacks and other minorities. Fraternities headed in the other direction; rather than adopt the spirit of the civil-rights movement, they fought against it. Often, they relied on a particularly effective way to preserve the white brotherhood: the requirement of a unanimous, secret vote approving new members. Under the time-honored blackball system, brothers would pass around a box into which they would deposit balls that were typically the size of marbles. A white ball represented approval of a pledge and a black ball, rejection. A single, prejudiced member could “blackball” a Jewish or black pledge, no questions asked.

  In 1966, Daniel Sheehan, a white student who was social chairman at SAE’s Harvard chapter, nominated as a member Tommy Davis, who was African American. “He was the first black man ever to receive a nomination for membership in SAE in the entire history of that old, traditional Southern fraternity,” Sheehan, who became a civil-rights lawyer, wrote in a 2013 book. Davis was blackballed. “I stood up and announced that I was going to blackball every single other nominee until whoever had thrown the black balls against Tommy Davis fessed up and gave us their reasons.” Sheehan blackballed the next ten nominees, until one member, from Cleveland, said he had heard Davis dated white women: “If he were to show up at one of our SAE social gatherings with a white date, why, I just don’t know what I would do.”

  “He’s on the dean’s list. And he is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met at Harvard,” Sheehan recalled saying in reply. “And, besides, I understand that he presses twice his weight in the varsity weight room. So exactly what would you do if he came to one of our social functions with a white date?”

  Sheehan said the room was silent, and he suggested the member could just leave the party if Davis showed up with a white date. The blackballing continued, until Sheehan said he wouldn’t approve any new brothers as long as he was a voting member of SAE. Davis won a bid. But when Sheehan explained how it had happened, Davis declin
ed. “I knew he wanted to join our fraternity, but he wouldn’t under those circumstances,” Sheehan said.

  SIGMA ALPHA EPSILON held its June 1969 convention in San Francisco, the capital of the counterculture. Yet the music the members danced to at the Palace Hotel, known for hosting presidents and debutantes in its luxurious Beaux Arts decor, wasn’t Janis Joplin or Jimi Hendrix. Suggesting little had changed since the 1950s, members and their guests enjoyed the twelve-piece band of Ray Hackett, the music director for the 1960 Republican national convention. Once again, the business of the meeting was discrimination and how to preserve it. At least a dozen colleges had indicated they couldn’t allow chapters on their campuses whose national organizations required unanimous approval of every pledge because they understood how the blackballing system excluded African American members.

  Steve Walker, a consultant to the national SAE office, had toured seventy-two chapters, from Florida State University (FSU) to the University of Maine. He had concluded that fraternities would be expelled from campus if they continued to require unanimous approval of pledges. SAE had faced a similar threat in 1951 because of the “Aryan” clause in its national laws. At the convention, conservative alumni wanted to stick with the tradition of the blackball. They argued that they had a constitutional right to choose members however they liked, federal law notwithstanding. Richard Generelly, a Washington lawyer, called abandoning the blackball a “suicidal experiment” and an “inexcusable surrender of the freedom of association guaranteed our fraternity under the First Amendment.” An internal SAE survey showed that undergraduates were split. About half favored preserving the blackball. Forty percent said a black brother would hurt their chapter, and more than half said they wouldn’t welcome a black student who was already an SAE member transferring from another campus.

  Walker wanted to save SAE chapters in the North and West. Echoing his forerunners at the 1951 convention, he drew on his impeccable Southern credentials to convince the skeptical crowd. As an alumnus of the University of Alabama, he belonged to the “mother,” or first, chapter. Walker had established his conservative bona fides when he fought against Students for a Democratic Society, activists who opposed the Vietnam War, supported racial justice, and viewed fraternities as part of an unfair American social system. “I am certainly no left-wing radical,” Walker told members of the convention.

  To win over fellow Southerners, Walker summoned the same argument that prevailed in 1951. He suggested a way to eliminate the language about the blackball without changing the practice itself. It would all hinge on the words at least. The national laws would require at least a majority vote, but chapters would have the authority to set a stricter standard, including a unanimous vote. The law would specify that “the election of pledges shall be the sole prerogative of the individual chapters.” Again, it was public relations and semantics. When a college president asked if SAE required a unanimous vote, the national office could say, truthfully, that it mandated merely a majority. The rest was up to students. Walker offered powerful evidence that the status quo would remain. He invoked the 1951 decision to eliminate the discriminatory clause, which he said had no effect on the fraternity’s membership practices. “There were many, many people throughout the fraternity… who threw (their) arms up in despair and said, ‘If we pass this law there is going to be a great influx of black members,’” Walker said. “I submit to you that simply hasn’t happened.”

  The motion passed, and the next year an SAE field report showed that the lawyerly language had done its job. In April 1970, Thomas M. Rigdon, president of SAE’s University of Missouri chapter, described a fraternity in ascendance. He chronicled a string of victories: a successful rush; improving grades; a van for blood donations; a Christmas party for a school for the deaf; victories in football, golf, and swimming; eight men on the varsity basketball team; writers for the school newspaper; students in the campus branch of the US Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps; and class officers. One piece of news would have especially interested alumni at the San Francisco convention. A black student had tried to join the chapter. Rigdon offered a window into the deliberations:

  Thoughtful conflict arose over the bidding of a Negro during this rush week with the 100 percent rule being severely criticized by some. The Negro was not bid, and the 100 percent rule withstood. Emotions were stirred by both issues. During the heat of debate, I was touched by the deepest feeling felt in fraternity life as I observed young men debating complex issues in a tolerant, thoughtful manner. Everyone in the chapter gained from this experience.

  The “100 percent rule”—namely, the blackball—had worked just as the convention had hoped it would. Still, Rigdon felt sure the times were changing: “I predict that within two or three years the 100 percent rule will fall, and, in the future, if a qualified man enters rush, no matter what his color, he will be pledged.”

  Rigdon’s prediction proved optimistic, though even the unspoken prohibition on black and Jewish members gradually disappeared, in most chapters, over the next few decades. SAE doesn’t have records detailing the first members to break those barriers. Whereas Jews would rise to occupy even the highest levels of SAE national leadership, blacks faced tougher barriers, as well as conflicted emotions when they did gain acceptance.

  W. Ahmad Salih, an African American who graduated from MIT in 1972, joined SAE, though only briefly. In a collection of oral histories of black MIT students, Salih said he knew of another black student, a senior, who also belonged to the fraternity. Salih grew up in Chicago, the child of poor, uneducated parents who had emigrated from the South. He chose the chapter because its members were known as serious students and athletes. But soon after he read the Autobiography of Malcolm X and a book on lynching, he changed his mind. “That book got me so upset at white people in general that I started losing weight,” he said. “I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t live in the fraternity anymore.” The robes and hoods in SAE’s initiation reminded him of the Ku Klux Klan. Even though he was already a brother, he decided to quit. “I mean we didn’t have a burning cross, but the image was painful,” said Salih, who became an emergency-room physician in California.

  America’s racial history haunted these SAE members, white and black. Their recollections illustrated the tug-of-war between progress and resistance in the fraternity movement. To understand this dynamic more fully, I decided to travel to the University of Alabama, where SAE’s story began.

  7

  OLD ROW

  “Who Does Not Make the Poor Man Conscious of His Poverty… or Any Man of His Inferiority”

  Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s mansion at the University of Alabama looks more like a Southern plantation house than a frat. Two gilded lions, their heads resting languidly on giant paws, flank an entrance framed by towering white Corinthian columns. SAE’s oldest chapter holds a privileged place among the Neoclassical buildings that form the grandest fraternity row in America. In the taxonomy of Greek life in Alabama, SAE is “Old Row.” These organizations, which have the longest histories on campus, dominate the social food chain. Some “New Row” chapters may have bigger and more modern houses, but they don’t have the prestige, the deepest ties to tradition and power. Like other Old Row fraternities, SAE selects many of its members from the state’s most prominent and blue-blooded families, whose sons have presided over the South since the nineteenth century.

  I came here to meet one of those sons, Benjamin Carter Goodwyn, the twenty-one-year-old president of the Alabama SAE chapter. The Goodwyns can trace their lineage to John Tyler, a Virginian and states’-rights advocate who became the tenth US president in 1841. On a warm October afternoon in 2015, Carter Goodwyn waited for me on the front steps in shorts and sandals and a backpack by his side. With his mop of red hair and light stubble on his chin, he hardly looked like the leader, or “Eminent Archon,” of one of the most powerful organizations on campus. But Goodwyn had every reason to feel at home. Both his great-grandfather and grandfather served
as chapter presidents. His father, the chapter’s house manager, met his mother, an Alpha Gamma sorority girl, on Old Row. Her father and grandfather also belonged to SAE. Goodwyn has three SAE uncles, too. In the fraternity world, Carter Goodwyn qualifies as aristocracy—he is the ultimate fraternity “legacy,” or child of an alumnus, with a diamond-shaped Eminent Archon badge carved with the initials of his ancestors. As he settled into an oversized leather couch in the chapter-house living room, he told me, “I’m big on family tradition.”

  Goodwyn showed me a weathered fraternity album and pointed to the generations of relatives who paved the path before him. Here was George Thomas Goodwyn, Carter’s grandfather, who teamed up with a pledge brother in 1947 to found one of the Southeast’s largest engineering and architecture firms. Both civil engineers, they built hotels, hospitals, schools, dormitories, and sports centers from Selma to Charleston to Oklahoma City. He flipped the page, and there was Carter’s father, George Thomas Jr. He also went into business with a pledge brother. Together, they formed the Goodwyn Building Company, which develops residential subdivisions of affordable homes with names such as Cotton Lakes. Goodwyn, who is earning a joint engineering-MBA degree, stood ready to take his place among those builders. In every way, Goodwyn’s family, friends, and business relationships are so tightly intertwined with SAE’s first chapter that they form a kind of rope extended from one generation to the next.